Magic: The Gathering Strategy Board Game announced

At this weekend’s International Spieltage (or Essen as most people call it) Wizards of The Coast officially announced the Magic: The Gathering Strategy Board Game.
Magic: The Gathering Strategy Board Game (or M:TGSBG as I’m going to call it now as I’m a lazy typist) is a tactical miniatures game played over a customisable 3D board. Like the classic card game players will take control of a planeswalker and summon creatures to the battlefield to destroy the opposing planeswalker. Players will start the game with just their planeswalker on the table and subsequently summon squads of creatures during the game. There are going to be scenario based objectives, so the game won’t just be about killing the opposing Planeswalker.

So far a small number of miniatures and scenarios have been announced and the majority of the reveals so far have concentrated on Chandra and the units available to the red faction.

Mechanics seem very similar to those used in the card game and initial photographs from the floor at Essen show plenty of miniatures, cards and even dice. The game will be for 2 to 5 players and the base game will include 5 planeswalkers, one of each for the five colours used in the card game. Although there hasn’t been much talk of what happens beyond the box you can be sure that M:TGSBG is going to have plenty of expansions and collectible miniatures, it’s the nature of the game.

The 3D board make the game look very much like Heroscape, which although out of print since 2010 still has a loyal cult following. It’s not really much of a surprise especially as both games where developed by Hasbro and Craig Van Ness has been a designer on both games.

This isn’t the first time that the Magic card game has been converted into a three dimensional strategy game, Magic The Gathering Tactics brought the concept to video games and really wasn’t very good. M:TGSBG also looks remarkably similar to Wizards of the Coast’s previous miniature game, Dungeon Command which although it received many positive reviews gamers didn’t take to it.

The game is set for release autumn 2015, so we can expect an official launch at Gen Con 2015. In the meantime feats you eyes on loads of pictures at Gathering Magic.